Over the past decade economic policy in the UK and elsewhere has been guided by the belief that resources are used more efficiently in the private sector than under state ownership. Consequently, many formerly state-owned companies have been transferred to the private sector. After surveying the theoretical arguments for and against this hypothesis, this book examines the experience of eleven firms, including British Airways, Rolls-Royce and British Telecom.

Various indicators are used to measure each firm's performance before and after privatisation to assess whether this policy has brought about improvements in efficiency.

The first four chapters provide background material for the empirical work that follows. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical arguments for and against the idea that private ownership will be more efficient than state control. Chapter 2 provides brief histories of the eleven organisations studied and chapter 3 discusses how their performance can be measured. Chapter 4 reviews the literature on the relative efficiency of public and private ownership.

Chapter 5 considers the impact of privatisation on each of the eleven firms' labour and total factor productivity growth. Chapter 6 performs a similar analysis using two standard accounting ratios (value-added and the rate of profit). Chapter 7 assesses the impact of privatisation on technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis. In chapter 8 the impact of ownership on employment, wage levels and the distribution of business income is considered.

The penultimate chapter discusses the restructuring that has followed each company's move into the private sector, and the final chapter summarises the results.